Events: In 1852 Britain’s first pillar boxes were introduced in St Helier, Jersey; in 1874 the first edition of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd was published; in 1936 the first edition of Life magazine appeared; in 1963 the first episode of Doctor Who was screened by the BBC.
Births: François-Noël Babeuf, French revolutionary, born in Saint-Quentin, 1760; Franklin Pierce, 14th American President 1853-57, born in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, 1804; James Thomson, poet remembered for his melancholy City of Dreadful Night (1874), born in Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire, 1834; William Bonney, the outlaw Billy the Kid, born in New York, 1859; Manuel de Falla, composer of The Three-Cornered Hat (1919), born in Cádiz, Spain, 1876; Enver Pasha, leader of the 1913 Young Turk coup, who helped to bring Turkey into the First World War, born in Apana, Turkey, 1881; “Harpo” Marx, actor and comedian, born in New York, 1888.
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Deaths: Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the throne who impersonated the younger Prince in the Tower, was executed in London, 1499; Richard Hakluyt, geographer whose Principall Navigations (1589) contains first-hand accounts of all leading voyages of discovery to date, died in London, 1616; Claude Lorrain, French landscape painter, died in Rome, 1682; Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, German astronomer, died in St Petersburg, Russia, 1864; Octave Chanute, aeronaut, died in Chicago, Illinois, 1910.